Yes

I don’t think a country where everyone is absolutely right would work.

>I wonder which country will be the first to be run entirely by AI instead of corrupt politicians

State of Utopia[1] has this manifesto[2]. In our estimation (and we use AI a lot), it is not powerful enough to govern a country yet. We thought it was worth trying anyway.[3] We would like it to be able to handle contexts that are millions of times greater (think more like 1 billion tokens than 1 million tokens), and even so AI governance is a very difficult matter. In addition, once AI governance is achieved, how can you truly trust the governance model not to be corrupted? Transparent government run by AI is an additional point of difficulty. These days, the most difficult unsolved problem is how to introduce voting and users' comments without inviting comment spam and vote rigging. You can watch my latest update here[4] (I'm sorry, it's very quiet), and we welcome your input on all subjects. We have a fully autonomous agent currently running the country, which consists of a Mac Mini and a Claude subscription (plus our own dedicated server in a country that recognizes us, and we have a couple of other embassies by agreement and legal contract). But in practice this government just does whatever I tell it. It's not advanced enough to run a code of laws, which is one of the basic requirements citizens expect of their country. The size of problem space for running a country is larger than models can handle, but many things help.

One of the best hopes we have is with deterministic offline models where we share the pipeline with people ahead of time, so they know exactly how it will work. This could be a trustworthy matter of dispute resolution, if we get the architecture right.

For example, our country could help you sign a contract and in case of dispute, both parties could submit supporting documents and make statements and the offline model they agreed to at the time of signing their contract could adjudicate. This pipeline could be transparent from the start. This won't satisfy everyone, but might provide the minimum standard of having a code of laws that assists with contract enforcement. For now, all you can really do is keep checking our site for updates and leave comments about what direction you'd like the country to take. (For example, you can leave a comment on my latest update on Youtube.)

[1] https://stateofutopia.com

[2] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5...

[3] https://medium.com/@rviragh/ai-is-not-ready-to-create-utopia...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/live/K0dgrPRWPCs

I think it's similar everywhere. IIRC from time to time here in Argentina when there are too many big changes, the legislature make copy of one old law with all the amends and add all the new ones and approve the new version. Let's say every 50 years or so, and not all the laws at the same time. So the "current" law is a mostly a mess of patches.

The main difference is that in Britain the judge decisions become almost-laws, so it's like a repo with too many people with commit right. I think in Spain the judge decisions have less weight and only the legislature has commit permissions .

I think such "ludicrous sets of patches" are very common in many jurisdictions. (At least in Germany they are.) I agree, though, git patches would be a lot nicer.

It's not messy. You have to take into account that every patch is voted separately - read Robert's Rules of Order for an enlightenment ;)

Also the principle of common law.

Let's hear your solution to the mess.

That's a common fantasy of developers who haven't touched grass in a while.

You’d also probably be surprised about how subjective and unevenly applied the law is… by design, to allow appropriate outcomes and discretion.

Edit: Consider the following words included in law.

“reasonable” “reckless” “due care”

I don't think this is where the problem lies. If you kill someone with intent, it's murder. But the whole system needs to prove that you killed someone with intent beyond a reasonable doubt, and a DSL will not help you there.

Have you actually tried reading a single law? If you have, have you tried to write just one article in formal logic?

Certain laws, like parts of tax law may be possible to turn into code, like percentages and deadlines, but even those often carry natural language conditions that can't be evaluated so easily. Seriously, try it.

Maybe we should go further and use some DSL to speak with each other in the first place? Would def make everything straight and eliminate ambiguity!

Law is not 100% exact. For instance, the age of consent in Spain it's 16, and you are adult by 19. You and a group of people had sex with a 15 yo. Your friends are well over 20 (24, 25...), and OFC trialed and jailed. But you, being almost close in maturity to that girl, (and noticed by psychologysts testing both the girl's mindset and yours ) can have the charges perfectly dropped.

Ditto with alcohol laws -18 there-. Selling a cyder to a 17 + 11 months guy would have a much smaller fine than a hard liquor to a 14yo.

The reverse it's true, too. 14yo are the minimum age to be legally punished. If you are 13 and barely stole some $20 Steam card -if any- you just got sentenced to spend your formative years in a juvenile center.

But, if you are 13yo gang member and you have a longass list of both petty and hard crimes and the last one has been a bloody crime with serious injuries or homicide... you can be sent as an exception to an adult prison because your mentality and mindset are not the ones from the early teens.

Especially if your body it's really developed for your age and you basically commanded mini-clans as the ones you can see in Ireland, Italy and the like. When you can smack down adults at age 13 and even ilegally drive a car, the Spanish constitution wont save you. Ultimately you must -and can- be trialed as an adult but also be able to finish the mandatory education years until you hit 16. Not easy, of course, but sending these kind of people to juvenile centers just generates more thugs than anything else.

If this is difficult for humans, imagine that for software with exact constraints.